Amy's Children (24 page)

She wondered if she should throw them out and use the box for something else, perhaps a crochet hook and some cotton with which she would work on some table mats or a collar and cuffs set, or something for the baby while she was in hospital. Lying on her bed again in her petticoat she decided to dismiss the idea of table mats since she would soon have no place of her own.

Immediately she got home from work she took off her dress, the buttons fastening it in front now transferred to the extreme edge, and got the evening meal in her petticoat. It was December and very hot weather, and the first week after she told Lance about the baby.

Kathleen changed into shorts and a cotton knit top Amy got cheaply from Lincolns because the machinist had put a pale blue cuff on one sleeve and a darker shade on the other. Amy had unpicked the sleeves, cut strips from them and bound the armholes. She wore it for two summers, then Kathleen said it was no use to Amy while she was “like that” and took it for herself.

Kathleen looked with distaste at Amy peeling potatoes with the straps of her petticoat slipping from her shoulders and some strands of hair dangling towards her nose.

“One day the Misses Sweetleys will see you like that and all will be revealed,” Kathleen said.

“Shut up and set the table.”

“God, that counter at A.H.'s isn't going to hide you forever, Amy.”

Amy sat to slice the handful of beans she had gathered from the garden. She smiled on them. They were such a tender green, supple but not limp, a delicate little spring curling from their tops. It seemed a shame to have to tear it away.

“At least you've stopped weeping,” Kathleen said.

Amy got up to find a saucepan. Her petticoat was stuck to the points of her buttocks, and the backs of her knees were exposed like pale pink blotting paper marked with a blue pencil.

“How can I ask Joe to tea with you looking like that?”

“If you do, warn him there's worse to come.”

“You disgust me. Not just the way you are either.”

Amy sent a rush of water over the beans.

“Have you heard from Grease Pot?” Kathleen asked.

“No. Have you heard from the Junior Size?”

“No,” said Kathleen. “Nor do I want to.”

Amy was at the stove and a lot of her neck showed above the petticoat. Bent with the hair parted it looked as young as Lebby's as Kathleen remembered her.

“Amy!” she cried and Amy turned with the saucepan poised above the flaring jet, her eyes like the blue flame yet to gather warmth.

Kathleen got up and flung a cloth on the table. I nearly said I'd help you, Amy, she said to herself, biting her lip in confusion.

She turned her back to show Amy her own bowed neck and took cutlery from the kitchen drawer.

Kathleen suggested Patricia come into Anthony Horderns and meet Joe Miller.

“You can give me the lowdown on what you think,” Kathleen said.

“But are you going to marry him?” Patricia saw herself as bridesmaid.

“Depends,” Kathleen said.

Patricia wanted to say “On what?” but felt the inadequacy of one who believed the luxury of such a choice would always evade her.

They were in blouses and shorts over bathing suits on the back steps of the Petersham house. Patricia had stayed overnight and slept on the lounge. Amy had never allowed the lounge to be used this way before. Now she did not care. She felt it had betrayed her, as Lance had.

It being Sunday, Kathleen and Patricia were going to Bondi.

“Where it all began,” Kathleen whispered to Patricia, rolling her eyes towards the kitchen window, behind which Amy was washing the breakfast things.

They were delayed in getting away. The front gate clicked open, and they both jumped up and ran to meet Daphne with tear marks on her face and a screwed-up handkerchief in her hand.

“Aunty Daph!” Patricia cried.

Daphne gave her head a little shake and went faster into the house to meet Amy coming out.

“Aunty Daph!” Amy echoed.

Under her breath Kathleen said: “Hell, what now?”

“It's come to an 'ead,” Daphne said, unclicking her handbag to put her wet handkerchief there.

Amy took her elbow and steered her into the lounge room. She sat and occupied herself for a moment with spreading a fresh handkerchief on the arm of her chair.

“I should get covers,' Amy murmured, briefly back on good terms with the lounge.

“Although I suppose it's a little late now.”

“It makes two of us,” Daphne said.

Patricia turned a little pale and looked around the room as if it might be swept away at any moment and she should memorize it. Kathleen leaned back in the corner of her chair and made her face quiet.

“You'd know without me tellin' what Madam wants,” Daphne said.

“Your house,” Kathleen said.

Patricia jumped with a wild look around the room as if this time it was really going. Then she put an arm around Daphne's neck and laid a cheek on her shoulder.

Amy watched as she closed her eyes, channelling the full force of her love to Daphne.

Amy raised her legs and laid them crossways on her chair, nudging the bulge of her stomach gently with her knee. He's safe there, she thought. All mine. Loving no other than me.

She sent a small frowning glance to Kathleen and Patricia.

“There's nothing stopping you two going off to the beach.”

“Whatever is going to happen to us?” Patricia whispered to Kathleen. They were in the tram, which was shrieking as it turned its nose up Oxford Street on its way to the coast.

They passed mean little balconies with people lined up on them watching with dreams in their eyes. Patricia was surprised to see an absence of envy and discontent in their expressions, since there appeared to be no prospect of their going to the beach.

They were crossing the sand looking for a place to leave their towels when Kathleen paused, rushed on and hissed: “Look neither to left or right, but straight ahead! Fix your eyes on that buoy four breakers out and do not move them!”

Patricia immediately looked to either side and behind her, stumbling over a pair of legs belonging to a sunbather and pitching forward to arouse the attention of every group within a radius of fifty yards.

Kathleen ran so fast then, jumping over bodies and sending sand flying into faces that Patricia, scrambling to her feet, was afraid she would lose her. Kathleen dropped down at last near a Greek family, the women in black headscarves and the men in navy serge trousers and sandshoes, all solid enough to make a protective wall, and there she lay getting her breath back in little moaning pants.

“Oh, look what you've gone and done!” She closed her eyes and pushed her face into the sand as if she were planning on suffocation. Patricia put a hesitant hand between her shoulder blades. She withdrew it from the quivering flesh, and on her knees peered over the heads of the Greek people for clues among the crowd. Kathleen sat up and pressed her face between her knees.

“He's here,” she said.

“Joe?”

“No other.” Kathleen squeezed her eyes shut.

“Now I don't have to ask Mrs Campbell can I go early on Friday night for a gander!”

“You certainly don't.” Kathleen stood and turned her back in the direction of Joe.

“I'd like a look,” Patricia said with a trace of wistfulness.

“Go ahead while I take a swim.” Kathleen began easing her shorts down over her hips, bringing sparks to the eyes of the Greek men. “Look out for a lump of lard, but make haste before it melts and there's nothing left but a straw hat.” She folded her shorts with great care, no tremor in her long fine hands among the folds. “He's wearing, I'll have you know, his school hat! To let everyone know he went to a posh school. Not a trace of a suntan.

“I'd be humiliated beyond words to set foot on a beach without a suntan!”

“Was he all by himself?” Patricia asked, not entirely innocent.

Kathleen ran fast towards the water and Patricia following did not see her face.

“He may have been, or he may not have been!” Kathleen leapt over small waves poised for breaking. “As far as I'm concerned he's by himself from now on!”

 

They were leaving the beach, going up the steps to the boulevard when Kathleen gripped Patricia, who winced at the hurt to her sunburned arm.

“I was descending these steps when I first saw Allan Yates,” she said. “This place is doomed for me. Let's leave it behind forever!”

She raced for the tram stop with Patricia, who was growing a little plump through eating too many broken biscuits at Campbells, a few paces behind.

When they flopped down on the seat for waiting passengers, Kathleen took out her compact and fastidiously flicked sand from little crevices in her face and among her eyebrows. She continued her toilet, combing her hair and rolling the ends under, until the tram rumbled towards them.

“I might write to Allan Yates tonight,” she said, swinging her bag onto her arm. “Never a weekend passed that he didn't take me somewhere.

“We never passed a cafe that he didn't drag me into for coffee and cake, magnificent toasted sandwiches. Nothing was too good for me. To hell with Amy and her wanton ways!”

They climbed on the tram and needing to strap-hang, Kathleen had to continue in a mutter, her lips crushed against her raised arm.

“I'll write and bring him running!”

But she wrote to Miss Parks instead.

It was quite late in the evening before she shut her bedroom door. Daphne was still at the house when she and Patricia got back, still in the lounge room with Amy.

Patricia rushed straight in to take Daphne's hand and sit close to her. It was plain that Daphne had shed a great many tears during their absence. The handkerchief she had spread on the chair arm was now crumpled on her lap, and her leathery skin was blotched with a pale beetroot colour, darker on the tip of her nose. Amy had given her a face washer wrung out in cold water to dab on her forehead. The washer was laid across a shoulder and Patricia jumped and had to stifle a giggle when her cheek felt the unexpected chill.

Amy's face had taken on its customary late-Sunday expression of anxiety, contrasting with the relief when she turned her back on curious and suspicious eyes leaving work at midday on Saturday. Now her eyes and mouth betrayed the torment of facing them again on Monday morning.

But she told herself she must worry more for Daphne. Dudley had died without leaving life insurance, the house was not fully paid for and Peter's gratuity pay for war service was almost gone.

She would need to go out to work and after twenty-five years, she doubted that she would find work at her old trade of seamstress.

“I would find it easier to bear but for the way she put it,” Daphne moaned. “‘He'll get the place eventually.'”

Amy made sympathetic noises with tongue and teeth.

Daphne rubbed her eyes briefly with the washer, and forgetting it wasn't a handkerchief squeezed it in her hand, causing a little trickle of moisture onto Patricia's arm and another stifled giggle.

“I wish I was lyin' beside Dud, except that's exactly what she wants!”

I am alive and giving life, Amy thought. It's not wrong that I feel glad.

“Everything goes against you,” Daphne moaned on. “I lose Peter then Dud, and all I have left gets into the clutches of that crowd. Dud never took to them.” She laid the washer back on her shoulder.

“I don't suppose now the way things have gone with you and the Yates man there's any chance of me gettin' work in his factory.

“My eyes are not that good for fine work, but I can still make good buttonholes. I was always the best at buttonholes.”

Amy made more soothing noises, this time with wistful overtones.

She had to fight off a swift vision of Lance at the finishers' table watching the women, chin resting on the sharp ridge of his collar, two fingers in a waistcoat pocket. Then if he saw her his chin would jerk sharply up, his body moving involuntarily, as if he would skirt the table to reach her, but instead taking himself in control, looking back on the women's work with a deepening frown, furrowing their brows too and setting up a new nervousness in their fingers.

“Your buttonholes are always perfect,” Amy murmured.

“To think of the hundreds I made for them! Never a dress or skirt that didn't come over the fence for me to finish off!”

“Don't think about it,” Amy pleaded.

“She won't be callin' on me for the weddin' dress. Make no mistake there!”

There was the sound of Kathleen and Patricia beating their young feet on the steps coming in.

Amy got off the chair arm. “It's time for us to refill that teapot,” she said.

“I should be goin' 'ome,” Daphne said piteously.

“'Ome! I wonder how long I'll be callin' it that!”

Kathleen wrote to Miss Parks:

 

I have intended writing for a long time but it is not until now that I have
completely
made up my mind.

I am going to get more education. I have had some disastrous experiences with
men.
I absolutely loathe them. I want to become something, at this stage I'm not sure what, but you are the one person who can advise me. I know I must first get my Leaving Certificate and this should be possible by going to night school, which I am prepared to do.

As you know I broke my heart at leaving when I did, but such were the circumstances. Apart from my attitude towards men and my decision to blot them out of my life forever, I am disappointed in my mother, Amy. You would have witnessed the diabolical behaviour of mothers in your time and I can add one more sample to them. I have suffered greatly through her. First she left me at the tender age of four, and then brought great turmoil and embarrassment to my life by pretending we were sisters in order to act years younger than her rightful age and pretend to the world at large that she was without responsibilities. As you know, it was to relieve her of the burden of keeping me at school that I left to go into my present dead-end job. The only compensation is the books I can read during the dull, so deadly dull times. Even this is fraught with problems since the floorwalker wants a duster in my hand when I'm not wrapping books or ringing up the till. I am absolutely green with envy when people (students, groan, groan) come in to buy Shakespeare, Homer, T. S. Eliot and the like. Those are the only men in my life from now on.